The Closing That Almost Wasnt
The crossing went the way these things go when you have prepared properly for them, which is to say quietly and without flourish and with everybody a little tired afterward. Father Enrique drove down on the Friday. We did Burrell Whitaker first, in the dining room, with Corva and Patricia Lindeman present — Patricia had asked to be there, and had held up better than I had expected — and Burrell went with what I can only describe as the good manners of a man who has bought and sold a great many houses in his life and recognizes, finally, a clean contract. Mr. Lindeman, who had been told by his wife only that a friend of Corva's was doing a ritual he did not need to understand, sat on the porch and read a book about sailboats, and did not know, when he stood up, that his shoulders had been carrying a ghost for eight years. He did, however, stand up differently. Patricia noticed. That was, I thought, enough.
Emmett went an hour later. We did his in the attic, because he had asked for the attic, which was polite of him and which I respected. The letter — the one to Nola Pruitt — had been found in the end, not as itself but as a fact: Dee had tracked Nola Pruitt into the long version of a life. She had married a man named Rees Crowder in 1939, had three children, run a dry-goods store in Havelock, been widowed in 1971, and died in a nursing home in Kinston in 2004 at the age of